Innovation in a Reinvented World: 10 Essential Elements to Succeed in the New World of Business

EMC: Steve Todd, Distinguished Engineer, Author, Intrapreneur

It's been a couple of years since Steve Todd wrote his first book on intrapreneurship, Innovate with Influence, as a fast-track way of training his EMC colleagues on how to successfully do the same.

“I had a new role as a Distinguished Engineer at the company and thought it could serve as a template for new employees and a means of talent recruitment for EMC,” he says.

Todd discovered that others outside the company were interested in the same topic, and by sharing his high-tech stories of an intrapreneur after a decade of having worked for EMC, he raised the company's and his own profile and created a positive brand for both.

“Intrapreneurship at EMC has really changed over the last 10 years,” says Todd. “We have more technologies and more technologists at our fingertips; we have access to things that others in start-ups don't have. And because our culture breaks down silos internally, it has become easier to share across organizations and to collaborate with individuals from companies that we've brought on board over the last decade.”

Todd's career in innovation started right after college, followed him when he worked for Data General as a co-op employee in 1986, thrived when EMC acquired Data General in 1999, and has kept him on a roll ever since—fodder for many books to come and something that ensures repeatable successes for him as an innovator and intrapreneur.

His success didn't come without hard knocks along ...